A Sad Exchange with a Church of England Evangelical — As much as it pains me, because I really like Justin Welby, I cannot really disagree with this article. I had hoped Welby’s appointment would bring clarity to this situation, but it is still just as muddled as it was under Rowan Williams, with no clarity in sight.

Jesus on Safari — Almost ten years after his death, a tribute to Jaroslav Pelikan by Timothy George of Beason Divinity School at Samford University. Pelikan, who was raised a Lutheran and ended his earthly life as an Eastern Orthodox believer, was a prolific writer (a complete bibliography runs to fifty pages) and coined some pithy sayings which have stood the time, best known perhaps this: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” His magnum opus is The Christian Tradition, a five-volume, 2,100-page history of “what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the Word of God,” which unfortunately is not available as an eBook (or eBooks), and which in the currently available paperback edition costs around $100 for all five volumes.

Can churches become irresistible? — This is how Ian Paul starts his review of the work of Thom Shultz on the subject of why people leave or stay away from church In the end Thom Shultz proposes “four acts of love” which supposedly make a church irresistable. They resonate with me, but also raise some questions.

BBC’s Holocaust Tweet Shocker — a BBC program which, as part of the Beeb’s coverage on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day, was billed as looking “look at the anniversary and the issues involved from never forgetting, to man’s inhumanity. It will also ask: could something like this happen again?”, ended up tweeting their “one big Question: Is the time coming to lay the holocaust to rest?” I am in full sympathy with those whose reaction was, “It is time to lay the BBC to rest!”